People Have Asked What I Think of JK Rowling

Oh, goodness, I’m afraid. O.O

Okay, but in seriousness…this is gonna take me a minute. Because my feelings for the author herself are a bit complicated. And this is going to be a bit long, too. Sorry.

So…I know a bit about JK Rowling’s personal life before she published HP1. I know she had an abusive signif and at one point I think she was on food stamps or something and she basically overcame a lot of hardships. I know she’s a big supporter of LGBT+ rights and is very open about that on her social media. I know she’s also very responsive in a positive way to her fans, which is great, because some celebs can be just awful to their fans. I know that this woman is wildly creative and it took a lot of imagination to come up with the first Harry Potter book. I know that she is very dedicated to her series and the world of Harry Potter. None of these are bad things and are, in fact, really good things that impress me a lot. I think she tries to be a genuinely nice lady.

However. I think she has a few problems.

I think when Harry Potter started with book 1, despite her claims that she had literally everything plotted out, I don’t think HP was originally intended to be as dark and adult as it became. The reason I bring this up in relationship to how I feel about the author is this - I don’t think, as the books got darker, that she really knew what she was doing in all aspects of the story and where it was going. I think she set up a world in book 1 and 2 that wasn’t really sustainable at the level she was pushing it to as the series went on, and she didn’t realize this somehow.

And she still doesn’t realize it. She doesn’t consider Merope Gaunt to be a rapist. She doesn’t consider James, Lily, Remus, and Sirius to be bad people at any point (”a bit of a prat” isn’t the same as a legit bad person). She doesn’t acknowledge the severely abusive nature of Ron and Hermione’s early romantic relationship before they acknowledged they were in love. She doesn’t consider Neville’s grandmother to be abusive or a bad person. She doesn’t show Dumbledore to be a bad person in any way (he comes across more as “complicated” and as an older version of the somewhat bad boy doing bad things for good reasons trope). The inherent evilness of all the Slytherin kids. And while this impacts my ability to enjoy the books as much as I used to when I try to reread them, it also informs me quite a bit about the kind of person JK Rowling is herself.

Then we have things like the lack of racial diversity in the original books, what she did with Newt Scamander being a racist dirtbag, Ilvermorny, her appropriation of sacred topics, complete lack of understanding of American culture, the whitewashing/cultural erasure of characters like the Patil twins and Cho Chang, her blatantly impossible idea that racism based on skin color doesn’t exist in the Wizarding World…things she doesn’t acknowledge are an issue. She’s been notoriously silent any time anyone brings this stuff up.

So…what do I think of JK Rowling? She reminds me of my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law tries to be nice to everyone. She tries to be very loving and friendly and she’s generally sweet-tempered. But she’s also very ignorant, very non-aggressively racist, very non-aggressively against various demographics (one of those sweet, little ladies who stays in her house and knits socks for homeless people while murmuring, “Oh, my goodness gracious, well, all lives matter, especially the blue ones, and transgender bathroom laws are to prevent child molesters from taking advantage, everyone knows that”).

And that’s what I think of JK Rowling. I think she’s just ignorant of certain things. I think, for whatever reason, she doesn’t notice the fallout from things. She doesn’t see rape sometimes when it’s right there in front of her (or she does and just didn’t handle it right at all). She doesn’t see abuse every time it’s right there in front of her. Institutionalized racism seems to be a thing she is unaware of as it applies to British minorities like Indians and the Chinese. And she seems to be unaware of writer resources that are now available called sensitivity readers that can help her to avoid the pitfalls she’s already tripped and fallen into…

Unless she does know about them but is too set in her ways to change now. After all, she’s like 50 or something, and she used to be a billionaire, and Harry Potter is still one of the biggest money-making franchises in the book world to ever happen.

And the thing is, I don’t know her personally. So I’m not going to say she’s a racist evil witch who hates gay people or whatever because I don’t know that. And I’m not going to say she’s deliberately trying to hurt marginalized people because I don’t know that either. But she seems to be doing most of what is hurtful in ignorance. And she is a strong advocate for the oppressed in many, many ways. So I’m not going to say she’s all bad or mostly bad or even half bad. And she has accomplished a great deal that she has every right to be proud of, and overcome things that I don’t know I ever could. But she’s also made mistakes and so far, she hasn’t acknowledged or fixed any of them.

So that’s what I think about JK Rowling. It’s a 50-50 thing, basically. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, even when they muck up something beneath the umbrella of a cause or causes I’m violently passionate about…which she did. And even though sometimes I see a thing and I kind of want to throw something (I have a bad temper; it’s no reflection on her, to be honest. More on me). Still gonna give her the benefit of the doubt, though. Just not going to be rereading HP anytime soon because I just can’t and I’m not buying The Cursed Child because it sounds ridiculous.